Part 19 (1/2)

The next day they rode forth, host and guest, and that ride proved an eventful crisis in the fortune of Lionel Haughton. Hitherto I have elaborately dwelt on the fact that whatever the regard Darrell might feel for him, it was a regard apart from that interest which accepts a responsibility and links to itself a fate. And even if, at moments, the powerful and wealthy man had felt that interest, he had thrust it from him. That he meant to be generous was indeed certain, and this he had typically shown in a very trite matter-of-fact way. The tailor, whose visit had led to such perturbation, had received instructions beyond the mere supply of the raiment for which he had been summoned; and a large patent portmanteau, containing all that might const.i.tute the liberal outfit of a young man in the rank of gentleman, had arrived at Fawley, and amazed and moved Lionel, whom Darrell had by this time thoroughly reconciled to the acceptance of benefits. The gift denoted this: ”In recognizing you as kinsman, I shall henceforth provide for you as gentleman.” Darrell indeed meditated applying for an appointment in one of the public offices, the settlement of a liberal allowance, and a parting shake of the hand, which should imply, ”I have now behaved as becomes me: the rest belongs to you. We may never meet again. There is no reason why this good-by may not be forever.”

But in the course of that ride, Darrell's intentions changed. Wherefore?

You will never guess! Nothing so remote as the distance between cause and effect, and the cause for the effect here was--poor little Sophy.

The day was fresh, with a lovely breeze, as the two riders rode briskly over the turf of rolling commons, with the feathery boughs of neighbouring woodlands tossed joyously to and fro by the sportive summer wind. The exhilarating exercise and air raised Lionel's spirits, and released his tongue from all trammels; and when a boy is in high spirits, ten to one but he grows a frank egotist, feels the teeming life of his individuality, and talks about himself. Quite unconsciously, Lionel rattled out gay anecdotes of his school-days; his quarrel with a demoniacal usher; how he ran away; what befell him; how the doctor went after, and brought him back; how splendidly the doctor behaved,--neither flogged nor expelled him, but after patiently listening, while he rebuked the pupil, dismissed the usher, to the joy of the whole academy; how he fought the head boy in the school for calling the doctor a sneak; how, licked twice, he yet fought that head boy a third time, and licked him; how, when head boy himself, he had roused the whole school into a civil war, dividing the boys into Cavaliers and Roundheads; how clay was rolled out into cannon-b.a.l.l.s and pistol-shots, sticks shaped into swords, the playground disturbed to construct fortifications; how a slovenly stout boy enacted Cromwell; how he himself was elevated into Prince Rupert; and how, reversing all history, and infamously degrading Cromwell, Rupert would not consent to be beaten; and Cromwell at the last, disabled by an untoward blow across the knuckles, ignominiously yielded himself prisoner, was tried by a court-martial, and sentenced to be shot! To all this rubbish did Darrell incline his patient ear,--not encouraging, not interrupting, but sometimes stifling a sigh at the sound of Lionel's merry laugh, or the sight of his fair face, with heightened glow on his cheeks, and his long silky hair, worthy the name of lovelocks, blown by the wind from the open loyal features, which might well have graced the portrait of some youthful Cavalier. On bounded the Spanish jennet, on rattled the boy rider. He had left school now, in his headlong talk; he was describing his first friends.h.i.+p with Frank Vance, as a lodger at his mother's; how example fired him, and he took to sketch-work and painting; how kindly Vance gave him lessons; how at one time he wished to be a painter; how much the mere idea of such a thing vexed his mother, and how little she was moved when he told her that t.i.tian was of a very ancient family, and that Francis I., archetype of gentleman, visited Leonardo da Vinci's sick-bed; and that Henry VIII.

had said to a pert lord who had snubbed Holbein, ”I can make a lord any day, but I cannot make a Holbein!” how Mrs. Haughton still confounded all painters in the general image of the painter and the plumber who had cheated her so shamefully in the renewed window-sashes and redecorated walls, which Time and the four children of an Irish family had made necessary to the letting of the first floor. And these playful allusions to the maternal ideas were still not irreverent, but contrived so as rather to prepossess Darrell in Mrs. Haughton's favour by bringing out traits of a simple natural mother, too proud, perhaps, of her only son, not caring what she did, how she worked, so that he might not lose caste as a born Haughton. Darrell understood, and nodded his head approvingly.

”Certainly,” he said, speaking almost for the first time, ”Fame confers a rank above that of gentlemen and of kings; and as soon as she issues her patent of n.o.bility, it matters not a straw whether the recipient be the son of a Bourbon or of a tallow-chandler. But if Fame withhold her patent; if a well-born man paint aldermen, and be not famous (and I dare say you would have been neither a t.i.tian nor a Holbein),--why, he might as well be a painter and plumber, and has a better chance even of bread and cheese by standing to his post as gentleman. Mrs. Haughton was right, and I respect her.”

”Quite right. If I lived to the age of Methuselah, I could not paint a head like Frank Vance.”

”And even he is not famous yet. Never heard of him.”

”He will be famous: I am sure of it; and if you lived in London, you would hear of him even now. Oh, sir! such a portrait as he painted the other day! But I must tell you all about it.” And therewith Lionel plunged at once, medias res, into the brief broken epic of little Sophy, and the eccentric infirm Belisarius for whose sake she first toiled and then begged; with what artless eloquence he brought out the colours of the whole story,--now its humour, now its pathos; with what beautifying sympathy he adorned the image of the little vagrant girl, with her mien of gentlewoman and her simplicity of child; the river excursion to Hampton Court; her still delight; how annoyed he felt when Vance seemed ashamed of her before those fine people; the orchard scene in which he had read Darrell's letter, that, for the time, drove her from the foremost place in his thoughts; the return home, the parting, her wistful look back, the visit to the Cobbler's next day; even her farewell gift, the nursery poem, with the lines written on the fly-leaf, he had them by heart! Darrell, the grand advocate, felt he could not have produced on a jury, with those elements, the effect which that boy-narrator produced on his granite self.

”And, oh, sir!” cried Lionel, checking his horse, and even arresting Darrell's with bold right hand--”oh,” said he, as he brought his moist and pleading eyes in full battery upon the shaken fort to which he had mined his way--”oh, sir! you are so wise and rich and kind, do rescue that poor child from the penury and hards.h.i.+ps of such a life! If you could but have seen and heard her! She could never have been born to it!

You look away: I offend you! I have no right to tax your benevolence for others; but, instead of showering favours upon me, so little would suffice for her!--if she were but above positive want, with that old man (she would not be happy without him), safe in such a cottage as you give to your own peasants! I am a man, or shall be one soon; I can wrestle with the world, and force my way somehow; but that delicate child, a village show, or a beggar on the high road!--no mother, no brother, no one but that broken-down cripple, leaning upon her arm as his crutch. I cannot bear to think of it. I am sure I shall meet her again somewhere; and when I do, may I not write to you, and will you not come to her help? Do speak; do say 'Yes,' Mr. Darrell.”

The rich man's breast heaved slightly; he closed his eyes, but for a moment. There was a short and sharp struggle with his better self, and the better self conquered.

”Let go my reins; see, my horse puts down his ears; he may do you a mischief. Now canter on: you shall be satisfied. Give me a moment to--to unb.u.t.ton my coat: it is too tight for me.”

CHAPTER XII.

Guy Darrell gives way to an impulse, and quickly decides what he will do with it.

”Lionel Haughton,” said Guy Darrell, regaining his young cousin's side, and speaking in a firm and measured voice, ”I have to thank you for one very happy minute; the sight of a heart so fresh in the limpid purity of goodness is a luxury you cannot comprehend till you have come to my age; journeyed, like me, from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Heed me: if you had been half-a-dozen years older, and this child for whom you plead had been a fair young woman, perhaps just as innocent, just as charming,--more in peril,--my benevolence would have lain as dormant as a stone. A young man's foolish sentiment for a pretty girl,--as your true friend, I should have shrugged my shoulders and said, 'Beware!' Had I been your father, I should have taken alarm and frowned. I should have seen the sickly romance which ends in dupes and deceivers. But at your age, you, hearty, genial, and open-hearted boy,--you, caught but by the chivalrous compa.s.sion for helpless female childhood,--oh, that you were my son,--oh, that my dear father's blood were in those knightly veins!

I had a son once! G.o.d took him;” the strong man's lips quivered: he hurried on. ”I felt there was manhood in you, when you wrote to fling my churlish favours in my teeth; when you would have left my roof-tree in a burst of pa.s.sion which might be foolish, but was n.o.bler than the wisdom of calculating submission, manhood, but only perhaps man's pride as man,--man's heart not less cold than winter. To-day you have shown me something far better than pride; that nature which const.i.tutes the heroic temperament is completed by two attributes,--unflinching purpose, disinterested humanity. I know not yet if you have the first; you reveal to me the second. Yes! I accept the duties you propose to me; I will do more than leave to you the chance of discovering this poor child. I will direct my solicitor to take the right steps to do so. I will see that she is safe from the ills you feel for her. Lionel, more still, I am impatient till I write to Mrs. Haughton. I did her wrong. Remember, I have never seen her. I resented in her the cause of my quarrel with your father, who was once dear to me. Enough of that. I disliked the tone of her letters to me. I disliked it in the mother of a boy who had Darrell blood; other reasons too,--let them pa.s.s. But in providing for your education; I certainly thought her relations provided for her support.

She never asked me for help there; and, judging of her hastily, I thought she would not have scrupled to do so, if my help there had not been forestalled. You have made me understand her better; and, at all events, three-fourths of what we are in boyhood most of us owe to our mothers! You are frank, fearless, affectionate, a gentleman. I respect the mother who has such a son.”

Certainly praise was rare upon Darrell's lips; but when he did praise, he knew how to do it! And no man will ever command others who has not by nature that gift! It cannot be learned. Art and experience can only refine its expression.

CHAPTER XIII.

He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man's child, sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.

Lionel's departure was indefinitely postponed; nothing more was said of it. Meanwhile Darrell's manner towards him underwent a marked change.

The previous indifference the rich kinsman had hitherto shown as to the boy's past life, and the peculiarities of his intellect and character, wholly vanished. He sought now, on the contrary, to plumb thoroughly the more hidden depths which lurk in the nature of every human being, and which, in Lionel, were the more difficult to discern from the vivacity and candour which covered with so smooth and charming a surface a pride tremulously sensitive, and an ambition that startled himself in the hours when solitude and revery reflect upon the visions of youth the giant outline of its own hopes.

Darrell was not dissatisfied with the results of his survey; yet often, when perhaps most pleased, a shade would pa.s.s over his countenance; and had a woman who loved him been by to listen, she would have heard the short slight sigh which came and went too quickly for the duller sense of man's friends.h.i.+p to recognize it as the sound of sorrow.

In Darrell himself, thus insensibly altered, Lionel daily discovered more to charm his interest and deepen his affection. In this man's nature there were, indeed, such wondrous under-currents of sweetness, so suddenly gus.h.i.+ng forth, so suddenly vanis.h.i.+ng again! And exquisite in him were the traits of that sympathetic tact which the world calls fine breeding, but which comes only from a heart at once chivalrous and tender, the more bewitching in Darrell from their contrast with a manner usually cold, and a bearing so stamped with masculine, self-willed, haughty power. Thus--days went on as if Lionel had become a very child of the house. But his sojourn was in truth drawing near to a close not less abrupt and unexpected than the turn in his host's humours to which he owed the delay of his departure.

One bright afternoon, as Darrell was standing at the window of his private study, Fairthorn, who had crept in on some matter of business, looked at his countenance long and wistfully, and then, shambling up to his side, put one hand on his shoulder with a light timid touch, and, pointing with the other to Lionel, who was lying on the gra.s.s in front of the cas.e.m.e.nt reading the ”Faerie Queene,” said, ”Why do you take him to your heart if he does not comfort it?”